The History of Us Read Online Free Page A

book club. “I think so,” she said.
    “Got to be,” Josh said. “Look at her. That woman is definitely a ballet dancer.”
    “Will you go talk to her?” Eloise asked. “I’ll see if I can find Claire.”
    Eloise moved through the crowd across the foyer to look into the dining room, where people gathered around the hors d’oeuvres laid out on the table. No Claire, but she did see Theo, talking to Josh’s boss, Ben. He was looking through the photo album Theo had made when she was supposed to be working on her dissertation, filled with every picture of the house she could locate, arranged in her best guess at chronological order. Now she was pointing out photos and narrating like a tour guide. Theo, with her mobile, expressive features, her tendency to gesture expansively, was the sort of person whose appearance seems to change with her mood. Happy and animated, as she was now, she was lovely. “This is about the time my grandparents bought the house, in 1958. Some of the woodwork had been painted”—she said this with a shudder—“but they restored it to how it would have looked when it was built.”
    “When was it built?” Ben asked.
    “Eighteen ninety,” she said. “It’s in the Colonial Revival style, although it has three stories instead of the usual two. Do you know how we came to call the floors of a building stories ? Because of the murals on the different floors. So if you were on the third floor you were on the third story.”
    “That’s a good fact,” Ben said.
    “I know,” Theo said. “I like that one. It’s good to know where things come from.”
    “Do you write about houses? Like, architectural history?”
    “No,” Theo said. “Not at all. I’ve just researched this house, and the city, too, because I’m interested. I could tell you where the oldest house is, or where there used to be water—”
    “Where there used to be water?”
    “Yeah, like in Northside—one of the streets has newer houses than the others, because that area was water. Or, Over-the-Rhine used to be separated from downtown by a canal. Did you know that? That’s how it got that name, because German immigrants called the canal the Rhine. When they were taking the canal out, that’s when they got the idea to build a subway. But of course they never finished it.”
    Listening to her niece, the pleasure in her voice as she imparted these facts, Eloise winced. She’d tried without success to break Theo of her fondness for their hometown. Theo had come back for graduate school four years before despite offers from more prestigious schools, and moved back into the room she shared with Claire as though she’d never left. She put an I LOVE CINCINNATI bumper sticker on her car and wore T-shirts that said MADE IN OHIO or showed photos of local landmarks under the words THIS IS WHERE I’M FROM. Local landmarks, plus a shot of police in riot gear and one of Pete Rose grabbing his ballswith a fuck-you expression on his face. “It’s the complete picture,” Theo had said in answer to whatever wry comment Eloise had made. “Cincinnati’s gritty.”
    In Cincinnati you could make a virtue of grittiness, take pride in not living in some cleaner, wealthier, wussier city, though that was a problematic stance if you lived in a house like theirs. Even if it was a six-minute walk from a hot spot of crime, even if a friend who lived two streets over once had to dive under a car to avoid getting caught in cross fire. Did Theo’s civic pride extend to the high crime rate? The conservative provinciality of the population, the intractable problems of the urban poor, the low self-esteem? To identify so strongly with a city like this—what did that say about you? In Cincinnati when locals asked where you went to school they meant what high school. In Cincinnati when locals met a newcomer they asked, “Why’d you move here ?” It was a dying city, no matter how Theo winced and protested when Eloise used that term. One day